Scheduling interviews

A lot of interviews take place during the AEA meetings, which run from a Friday to Sunday in early January. Employers will contact you at any point between mid-November to late December to schedule interviews. They will not coordinate with each other, nor even use the same scheduling tool. It is up to you to be your own coordinator, and this takes care and planning. You won't know how many interview requests you will get. A lot of candidates will get well over 10, and very strong candidates may get more than 20. Fitting them in can be a challenge!

When should you be in the city?

The ideal answer is to arrive Wednesday (at the latest, early Thursday morning) and leave late Sunday night or Monday. . Given that the conference is in January, bad weather is sometimes a concern, so it is often worth paying a little extra to get direct flights to reduce risk of cancellation or arrive early to give yourself a cushion. You might want to think of some contingency plans like flying to a nearby city and renting a car and driving. Sometimes these plans are necessary, and if you have thought about it ahead of time, you won't panic as much.

Hotel rooms

 The AEA offers a discounted room rate, but they go fast. There is a day and time announced when the rooms open, usually in September. Rooms often book up in a matter of minutes, so do your absolute best to be online at the time, or deputize a friend to do it for you. Before the rooms open, do a little research about hotels. The opening is chaos, so you won't be able to calmly weigh the pros and cons of each hotel. Come up with a list of good hotels, and as soon as you see one, grab it. There are usually a lot of hotels in a cluster downtown, and then a few others scattered further, often a few miles away. It is a good idea to try to stay at one in the cluster. It makes it easier for you to pop back to your room if you have an hour or two to kill. There may also be some benefit to avoiding the main conference hotel, which is often huge and chaotic. Overall, these are relatively minor concerns, your main priority should be to secure a room. All the hotels will be decent quality and have quiet rooms, and there is a shuttle that runs to the far away hotels.

Scheduling interviews:

You will probably start getting interview invitations in November and will continue to get requests well into December. You will be contacted by email or phone with a list of possible times, or a link to a scheduling program with a list of links. Usually an employer will send these in quick succession, so it is a good idea to monitor your phone and email closely. If you don't respond for a few hours others will have signed up,and you won't have as many available options. You should keep a schedule of your interviews on hand at all times so you can refer to it instantly. 

Sometimes an employer will ask you to send a list of times you are available. The best response to this is to send the 3 or 4 times that work best with your schedule.

When you are getting your first requests you won't know what times subsequent interview requests will have available, but there are two strategies that can help. 

First, keep in mind that the most common times for interviews are Friday and Saturday between 9 and 5. Early morning/early evening on these days is a little less common, as is Sunday morning. The least common is Thursday or Sunday afternoon. Almost no interviews occur at other times. If you get a choice to schedule an interview at a less common time you should take it, even if there are Friday and Saturday times available. That way, if you get a subsequent call from an employer who is only interviewing on Friday and/or Saturday, it will be easier for you to fit them in.

Second, as much as possible, you should schedule appropriate timing between interviews. Most interviews run for a half hour on the half hour (9:00, 9:30, 10:00, etc.), but it is not uncommon for interviews to run for 45 minutes or for interviewers to schedule a 15 minute break between interviews, so you may have interviews that start or end on the :15 or :45. 

Make sure that you have enough time to get from one interview to the next. Just like the hotel rooms you book, interview rooms will primarily be in a central cluster of a few blocks, but some may be further away. 15 minutes allows you to move between rooms in the same hotel or one a block or two away, but may not allow you to move to one on the other side of the central cluster. 30 minutes should allow you enough time to travel anywhere in the central cluster, but may not give you time to get to a distant hotel. If you do have interview requests at distant hotels, it is great if you can do them on less common interview days, when travel time is less valuable.

On the other hand, scheduling too much time between interviews can clog up your schedule quickly. Assuming they are all in the central cluster, it is great to have an interview every hour. For example, one from 9-9:30, another from 10-10:30, another from 11-11:30 etc. If you have only one interview scheduled, and it is at 9, it is pretty ideal if someone offers you a slot at 10, which means your second interview will be finished at 10:30. It's also fine if you schedule it at 11, which allows you to squeeze another one in at 10. Less ideal is scheduling it at 10:30, which blocks off both the 10 and 11 slot. 

Don't worry about lunch or breaks, unless you have a medical condition that requires you to. Schedule as many interviews as possible, and then figure out how to schedule those in. If you have 30 minutes to your next interview and it is next door, grab a snack and use the restroom. If you have an hour or two you haven't filled up, grab some lunch.

If you have tight transitions between interviews, spend some time before hand scoping out the route beforehand. Maybe there is a road that isn't great for pedestrians or an intersection you can't cross at. And if a hotel is large, finding the appropriate elevators may take a couple minutes. You don't want to be late for an interview because of silly logistical delays. Locating restrooms in hotel lobbies is also a useful thing to do beforehand if things are going to be tight.

The last thing I want to mention regarding interview scheduling is strategizing over when interviewers are most receptive. I have heard various theories, but I don't really subscribe to any of them. If you have a first thing in the morning interview your interviewers may be fresh, or they may be jet lagged or just not morning people. If you have one later in the day, they may be tired, or they may have just seen a few weaker candidates in a row that make you look great in comparison. Overall, I don't recommend overthinking this one and assume that all time slots are basically equal.  There is a school of thought that your first couple interviews should be ones you don't care about as much, so you can use as warm-up. But if you have done enough good practice interviews it shouldn't matter. Jobs are hard to get, so you can't be throwing away interviews!